New York City has it’s own vibe unlike any other city, so just showing up is a story in itself. Once again, NYC delivered like it has every time I’ve been. Rather than bore you with a long drawn out blob of information hitting on these points, I’m just going to break it down into the posts below and possibly a couple extras as they come back to me

1. “Antonio” the independent Town Car driver
2. A 12 hour pub crawl with a client
3. Having productive networking meetings
4. A session
5. Happy hour with the Text Link Ads crew
6. Talking to almost every booth on all 3 floors at SES
7. Another pub crawl with local rock
8. Flight delay after flight delay, keep the tornado away

We’re excited to announce our plans for getting on the road this year. There are many conferences / expo’s for our industry now and it is a great way for us to get out and meet our current customers and maybe pick up some new recruits along the way.

We have definite plans to exhibit at one of the shows, with more to possibly follow. Let us know if you will be at any of these shows and we will be more than happy to try and meet up with you.

Search Engine Strategies Conference & Expo 2007

1. New York City – April 10-13
2. San Jose – August 20-23
   (We will be exhibiting at this event)

Ad-Tech Digital Marketing Conference 2007

1. Chicago – July 31-Aug1

WebmasterWorld Pubcon 2007

1. Las Vegas – TBA

Affiliate Summit 2007

1. Miami – July 8-10

Search Marketing Expo (SMX)

1. Seattle – June 4-5 (Advanced)
2. New York City – October 16-17 (Social Media)

Here are five tips from a Roofer SEO on how you can get noticed by others in your online market:

1. Create free tools that everyone can use.
   Think of something that would help you, have it put together, then offer it up for everyone else to use on your site or theirs.
2. Write reviews about other services within your market.
   If you can spend the time to learn all the other services in your market and give a constructive review, you’ll be surprised at how far flattery will get you.  Not to mention the social networks that may pick up your reviews and send loads of new readers.
3. Participate on your peers websites.
   Look for forums or blogs and interact with the owners and users on their website.  Make sure you use your name and include a link to your website in your profile.
4. Make public announcements through the press about your product or service.
   Use press releases and have them shown in popular news outlets like Yahoo and Google.  People like to keep up with the latest news related to their own market.
5. Network yourself through conferences.
   Most every industry will have some sort of conference or expo that will be full of people that are there to meet others and learn about products or services they may not have heard of.  Setup a booth and meet as many people as you can. You can also use webinar software to host your own online events
6. BONUS TIP:  Show up on the top of search results for keywords in your market.
   Anyone in your market will see who shows up first when potential customers enter your search terms.  If your website appears at the top for most search terms in your market, others in your market will try to figure out what you’re doing to capture most of the traffic. If you need WordPress support services, don’t hesitate to contact the experts at WebCitz.

These are obviously not the only solutions out there, but these will definitely get one going in the right direction.

We’re looking to make our blog as interactive and informative as possible with our readers. Along with the LinkWorth staff beginning to add posts, we want to offer our readers the ability to add their own information. If you want to have a voice on our blog, go here:

SUBMIT A BLOG POST TO LINKWORTH

You do not have to have an account to submit a post, just complete the form. All submissions will require approval before it is published.

Obviously we reserve the right to not publish any post we feel is not a fit for our blog, but if it is something our readers would be interested in, we’ll definitely post it.

Since early in the week our staff was able to get LinkWords back to running smoothly. We should be good for a long while now as we have planned for plenty of growth. Requests are being processed faster than ever.

We appreciate everyone’s patience who were affected.

Do you think you are good at developing plugins for different blog and content management software? Then you might just be the person we’re looking for!

We are on the hunt for someone that can help us develop a LinkWorth plugin that makes publishing our different ad products easier for partners. We have the basic idea, we just need a specialist to make it all work.

If you are interested, please send an email to admin (@) linkworth.com. Reference “Developer Needed” in the subject line.

There has been updates to the Google AdSense TOS. This is important to LinkWorth publishers who use AdSense as a source of additional revenue. We posted before about how our ads do not violate their terms as long as you do not format them to mimic AdSense ads. It is still the same thing, just make sure your users can differentiate between AdSense ads and LinkWorth ads. If you have any question or doubt, don’t chance it, make them look different.

Here is a good article I read with more detail. You can move on to the JenSense blog to read further if you are interested.

Publishers have often complained about the rigidness of the AdSense policy that prevents publishers from running AdSense on the same page as another contextual ad program. So running AdSense & Yahoo Publisher Network on the same page during the same page view would be a no-no, but rotated 50/50 would be perfectly within the AdSense (& YPN) policies and terms. But not any more. Their competitive ad policy has gotten much, much tighter when they updated their AdSense policies today.

Their competitve ads & services policy was updated to this today:

Competitive Ads and Services In order to prevent user confusion, we do not permit Google ads or search boxes to be published on websites that also contain other ads or services formatted to use the same layout and colors as the Google ads or search boxes on that site. Although you may sell ads directly on your site, it is your responsibility to ensure these ads cannot be confused with Google ads.

read more | digg story

I happened across an article through a spam comment post, which led me to webmasterworld and their discussion on the subject. The owner of wikipedia, Mr. Whales, calls out Google results are SPAM! He goes on to explain how his software is the wave of the future to combat companies like Google and their automated algorithmic methods that were easily manipulated by interested parties of their respective markets. He explains how his software (wikiasari) will be edited by a human before it is allowed within an index.

So there are many angles I could go on this, so lets dive in and hit them one at a time:

1. Initially, I was like, he might be on to something. A way for humans to have the say so on if a document deems the right to be listed well. Then I quickly thought of how well wikipedia does and there is so much spam plugged into those documents all over, it’s not even funny. Then the idea of corruption for those who have the power. I’m a pretty honest guy, but I was on DMOZ editorial staff back in its inception. I was very fair to anyone that submitted, but when it came time that I had sites that made money, I was probably too fair to let them in as quick as I did.
2. I then visited the site and it initially looks just like wikipedia. So what exactly will be the difference? I was hoping for a sample of results, but either missed it or it didn’t exist yet. I also noticed that in the article, Mr. Whales took a few shots directly at Google, yet, when you visit their mock site, it’s laced with Google AdSense ads on the right panel.
3. Finally, this guy speaks as if his model is fool proof. It’s definitely what you want to see in a leader to the free world, but obvious holes in his story make me giggle a bit more than get excited about the project. Billions of legitimate documents and you’re telling me they will all be judged fairly and accordingly by a real human initially? And what happens after time passes and 50,000,000 documents need to be reviewed again to ensure all is well? You hiring a sweat shop to do this all for the statistical data that makes humans feel better knowing it is being done?

In summary, this debate is quite an interesting one. There are some smart people over at webmasterworld quizzing some great points on the subject. Hey, regardless of what my post here sounds like, I would like to see Mr. Whales get this into production. There is nothing better than a little competition when it comes to company giants like Yahoo & Google!

I think Mr. Whales needs to speak with LinkWorth on how we can provide his new Wikiasari with the proper advertising system to differentiate himself further from the search giants. 😉 John Whales, give me a call (Ron Wicker), and I can tell you about the perfect platform for you that would be pay per performance without the ads taking up side bars or head & foot locations.

LinkWorth would like to tell all of our customers that we have greatly appreciated your help, business, criticisms, suggestions and most of all, your friendships. While we have not grown close to everyone, it’s just a matter of time before we get to know more of you. Those who we have gotten the face time with, can all agree a lifetime of memorable stories came from the experience. Other than running a business that all of our employees love, we wanted to make it a place that our customers love as much and we get the chance of making the entire experience a bit more personalized compared to most online services. So Thank You from the bottom of our hearts for making LinkWorth 2006 a great year and we hope that has turned into great years for each customer individually.

The New Year 2007 is set to make record breaking numbers with our new products, improved website, upgrading of product usability and our growing sales staff. Our lofty goal for 2007 is to increase our average partner payout between 100% up to 300%. In addition, we have set our goals to increase overall sales from our current average of 4% per month to over 10% per month. With the sales come the increase in partner payout.

• Average Partner Payout 2006 – $256.00 per month ($3,072 /year)
• Projected Partner Payout 2007 – $512.00-$1,024.00 per month ($6,144 to $12,288 /year)

We realize LinkWorth is more known for a way webmasters can monetize their website(s). There is no secret that if you randomly select 100 web users and ask them if they had a website, would they rather earn money to pay for that website or would they want to put more of their own money into bettering the website, over 90% of these random users will respond with “earn money”. Due to this fact, focus on our partners have increased for the new year.

Of course our Advertisers will always be a focus as they bring the financials into our market. The new year will bring new and better functioning products, along with a much needed usability upgrade to our backend.

We are very excited about the new year and hope our excitement can pour over into your lives and accounts as time goes on.

Happy New Year 2007 to Everyone!

It’s not secret that if you read Matt Cutt’s blog, there’s a lot of barking about how they urge the use of “nofollow” links if it is an advertising link. Most people think it’s a weak way for them to fix what they say is a problem, but they say it is meant to say you don’t trust the website you link to, which if you think about it, you can trust a paid link as much as a link that is not paid.

Well, this leads me to something interesting that I noticed today on Cutt’s blog where he is talking about metrics of comparing Firefox with IE. He lists several metrics websites and links to them and only one of them he has a “nofollow” link attached to it, “StatCounter“. The others, OneStat and Extreme Tracking are not selling links which makes it obvious the nofollow is due to the selling of links. So if all he barks is true about the nofollow means he doesn’t trust StatCounter, I would only guess it’s because they sell paid links on their site for big bucks because they have a PR10. Now, their link popularity is through the roof with around 2.5 MILLION backlinks because of people placing their code on their homepages, but still, according to the Goo-Gabbing, they’ve marked that site as selling links and Matt doesn’t want to trust their site from his blog because of it.

Now hopefully you’re keeping up, because based on that, these untrusted sites are said to not pass known sold links link strength. So armed with this info, I decided to check through these obvious paid links to see how they were doing. The first link is for http://www.proboostgold.com/, which is a PR7 and has shown backlinks from statcounter. The pattern held true where each link I reviewed, showed statcounter as one of their first listed backlinks, which from my experience, the strongest backlinks are usually shown first. . .theory, but evidence tends to prove it.

To sum up my research, I’ve often considered a lot of the matt cutts blabbing a bit of scare tactics. He obviously gives good info, but things he says “DON’T DO THIS WE’LL CATCH YOU!”, I think when it comes to trusted vs untrusted and paid vs unpaid links, this interesting find seems to prove it’s a google oversight, technical glitch or the proof of a bunch of hot air being blown at webmasters.